User interface formalization in visual data mining

Despite the existence of various data mining efforts that deal with user interface aspects, very few provide a formal specification of the syntax of the interface and the corresponding semantics. A formal specification facilitates the description of the system properties without being concerned about implementation details and enables the detection of fundamental design issues before they manifest themselves in the implementation. In visual data mining, a formal specification can enable users to decide which interaction/operation to apply to get a desired result; help users to predict the results of their interactions/operations with the system; and enable the development of a general interaction model that designers/developers can use to understand the relationships between user interactions and their compositions. In this work, we describe an approach for formalizing the visual interface of a core data mining system, which has been employed in the development of a visual data mining system named VidaMine.